Listed below are the Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI) for Physical Science and bullet points for their specific grade band progression.

PS3: Energy

PS3.A: Definitions of Energy

Primary School (K-2)

Elementary School (3-5)

The faster a given object is moving, the more energy it possesses.

Energy can be moved from place to place by moving objects or through sound, light, or electric currents.

Middle School (6-8)

Motion energy is properly called kinetic energy; it is proportional to the mass of the moving object and grows with the square of its speed.

A system of objects may also contain stored (potential) energy, depending on their relative positions.

The temperature of a system is proportional to the average internal kinetic energy and potential energy per atom or molecule (whichever is the appropriate building block for the system’s material). The details of that relationship depend on the type of atom or molecule and the interactions among the atoms in the material. Temperature is not a direct measure of a system's total thermal energy. The total thermal energy (sometimes called the total internal energy) of a system depends jointly on the temperature, the total number of atoms in the system, and the state of the material.

The term “heat” as used in everyday language refers both to thermal energy (the motion of atoms or molecules within a substance) and the transfer of that thermal energy from one object to another. In science, heat is used only for this second meaning; it refers to the energy transferred due to the temperature difference between two objects.

Temperature is not a measure of energy; the relationship between the temperature and the total energy of a system depends on the types, states, and amounts of matter present.

High School (9-12)

Energy is a quantitative property of a system that depends on the motion and interactions of matter and radiation within that system. That there is a single quantity called energy is due to the fact that a system’s total energy is conserved, even as, within the system, energy is continually transferred from one object to another and between its various possible forms.

At the macroscopic scale, energy manifests itself in multiple ways, such as in motion, sound, light, and thermal energy.

These relationships are better understood at the microscopic scale, at which all of the different manifestations of energy can be modeled as a combination of energy associated with the motion of particles and energy associated with the configuration (relative position of the particles). In some cases the relative position energy can be thought of as stored in fields (which mediate interactions between particles). This last concept includes radiation, a phenomenon in which energy stored in fields moves across space.

This is a table of the Disciplinary Core Ideas
of Physical Science. If
coming from a Standard the specific bullet point used is highlighted
and additional performance Expectations that make use of the
Disciplinary Core Idea can be found below the table.
To see all Disciplinary Core Ideas, click on the title "Disciplinary Core Ideas."